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was told he was found at one of the places of election in Old Town in poor condition and carried to the college hospital. My relation, a Mr. Henry Herring, was called to the scene at Ryan’s. At what time Edgar arrived in Baltimore, where he spent the time he was here, under what circumstances, all this I have been unable to ascertain.”
    I showed my surprise. “You mean you sought this information on your cousin’s death, and could not find it?”
    “I felt it my duty to try, relationships and so on,” he said. “We were cousins, yes, but we were also friends. We were the same age, Edgar and I, and he was not old enough to see the end of his life. I hope my own death is peaceful and in plain sight, somewhere surrounded by my family.”
    “You must have found something more?”
    “I’m afraid that whatever happened to Edgar has accompanied Cousin into the grave. Is this not sometimes the course of a life, Mr. Clark, for death to swallow a man up so wholly there are no traces left? To leave not a shadow, not even the shadow of a shadow.”
    “That is not all that is left, though, Mr. Poe,” I said, insistently. “Your cousin will be remembered. His works are immensely powerful.”
    “There is a kind of power to them. But it is usually the power of disease. Tell me, Mr. Clark, do you know something more about Edgar’s death?”
    I did not tell him about the man who warned me to stop looking at Poe’s death. Something stopped me. Perhaps this hesitation was the true beginning of the investigation. Perhaps I already suspected that there was more to this situation, more to Neilson Poe, than I’d yet been able to see.
    He could not even say much about Edgar Poe’s condition after he was rushed to the doctors from Ryan’s. Once Neilson had arrived at the hospital, the physicians advised that he not enter Edgar’s room, saying the patient was too excitable. Neilson only saw Poe through a curtain, and he looked from that vantage point like another man altogether, or a ghost of a body he had known. Neilson did not even have the chance to view the body before it was closed into the coffin.
    “I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can tell you about the end,” he sighed. Then he said it. The eulogy that I could not forget. “Edgar was an orphan in every way. He had seen much of sorrow, Mr. Clark, had so little reason to be satisfied with life that, to him, the change, death, can scarcely be said to be a misfortune.”
     
    My frustration at Neilson Poe’s complacency inspired me to call on the offices of a few newspapers with a faint hope of persuading them to at least pay better tribute to the genius of Poe. I described Poe’s paltry burial and the many erroneous facts in the short biographies so far published in the papers, hoping they would improve. But these visits were useless. At the office of one of the Whig newspapers, the
Patriot,
some reporters overheard me and, calling to mind that Poe wrote for the press, suggested with great solemnity that they take up a subscription to pay for a marker on Poe’s grave to honor a fallen fellow. As though Edgar Poe were simply another spinner of newspaper tales! Note, too, that I would not make the error of saying, as the periodical press had taken to doing, Edgar
Allan
Poe. No. The name was a contradiction, a chimera and an unholy monster. John Allan had taken in the poet as a young child in 1810, but later ungenerously abandoned him to the whims of the world.
    Passing the Presbyterian burial yard on my way home late one afternoon, I decided to see the poet’s resting place again. The old cemetery was a narrow block of graves on the corner of Fayette and Greene streets. The location of the grave was near the fine marker of General David Poe, a hero of the Revolutionary War and Edgar Poe’s grandfather. But there was something disconcerting.
    Poe’s own spot was still unmarked. It looked as though it had never been prayed over.
    Invisible Wo!
I could not stop from